I remember my first encounter with a computer was in high school calculus, an Olivetti Programma 101. It was part of our curriculum to program the arithmetic steps for summation equations. A decade later, I was learning DOS on a military computer. Not the underlying technology, I became the training guru for our Enable office suite. I also wrote all the automation scripts in Enable for the forms we had to process. I still use a copy of Enable O/A in my XP Mode emulator on Windows 7.

So, Christmas has snuck up on you and you find yourself heading out to the stores this weekend for one of the most popular electronic gifts of recent years: the smart phone. Cell phones have been a perennial favorite Christmas gift, but with so many good phones that are now “free” with contract, what makes for a good gift cell phone? If you aren’t planning on giving the cellular service too, the best choices are the phone upgrades that, for a bit more than the free phones, will prove far more enjoyable for your recipient. We have two such phones that will be sure to please almost anyone.

Over the last few decades, we have become accustomed to something rather unfortunate: we buy significant pieces of technology that we then discard as essentially useless after only a short time. I decided to set out to revive a nearly ten-year-old computer and see if this (relatively speaking) prehistoric computer could be brought up to a state of usefulness in the modern era.

The sun rose gloriously over the hill. A few wisps of fog floated down by the creek and there was just the tiniest bit of frost on the tulips. What a good day, I thought, to consider Google. I don’t know for certain that Google is now evil, but I bet that if it isn’t it soon will be. No one has ever survived possession of that much power without slipping over to the dark side.

Let us have a moment of silence for the Eastman Kodak Company. I'm serious. “The Great Yellow Father,” as it used to be called in the photography press (when there was a photography press), has filed for bankruptcy.

If you are running RHEL, you are already running a mail server. It's
installed by default and setup to run. Of course, it only delivers mail
locally, and only from sources within your own machine. Right now, there
are no sources, so there is no mail. But the server is running.

In our general smartphone guide, we laid out the basic smartphone situation and then looked at Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 and Apple’s iOS. In this piece we move on to a sampling of Android phones available this holiday season. Whether you are looking to give someone an Android handset for Christmas, or are thinking about picking one up for yourself, these contenders cover a good deal of the Android landscape this season, ranging from the impressively affordable AT&T Impulse 4G to Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S II.

Trying to pick out a smartphone for someone for Christmas is a difficult task. There are now dozens of potential contenders, priced from free to hundreds of dollars. How can you pick out one that will delight your recipient and serve him or her well for years to come? OFB Labs has thoroughly tested ten of the most recent smartphone offerings from AT&T, Sprint and Verizon to help you sort out which are best for your gift giving this year – or for picking up as a gift to yourself with some Christmas money.

In my explorations with RHEL 6, we have come a long way towards a useful computing environment. One piece we have not taken time to explore much, however, is one of the most important for many users: file sharing. If you intend using your RHEL machine to serve files amongst Windows
machines, one of the first things you should consider is using Samba.

With the Kindle Fire’s impending release adding yet another interesting dimension to the tablet market, selecting a tablet to give as a gift this season has become all the more complicated. More than likely, Amazon’s entry will dramatically change the playing field, but other tablets continue to have significant merits that make them worthy of gifting consideration this year. We look at the cream of the crop of those other tablets in light of the new Kindle, below.